Design

This article appears in slightly different form in the Nov/Dec 2013 issue of IEEE Micro © 2013 IEEE.

This time I look at two books that provide insight into how to solve technical design problems.

Design Appreciation

Design for Hackers: /Reverse-Engineering Beauty by David Kadavy (Wiley, UK, 2011, 352pp ISBN 978-1-119-99895-2, www.wiley.com, $39.95)

David Kadavy is a user interface designer working in Silicon Valley. Despite the general title, he has written a book about visual design. He sets the following goal for this book: 

If you want to learn to create great design yourself, if you want to gain design literacy, there simply is no way to do so with lists of rules. Instead, I want to provide you with a new set of eyes through which you can see the world anew.

This is the sort of goal a course in art appreciation or, changing eyes to ears, music appreciation might aim at. Knowing you (his audience), Kadavy uses the term "reverse engineering" to get your attention. Once he has your attention, however, he gives you a tour of subjects you didn't know you were interested in.

Kadavy begins with the Pantheon (not the Parthenon). Having been there, I can attest that it doesn't look particularly distinguished as you approach it from the streets of Rome. Once inside, most visitors are taken aback. If you have never seen the building, find an online reproduction of eighteenth century painter Giovanni Paolo Panini's The Interior of the Pantheon, and spend some time admiring it and taking in the geometric relationships. Proportions and the harmony of geometric shapes are design elements Kadavy wants your new eyes to see.

Built in 126 by the Emperor Hadrian, the Pantheon is meant as a monument to all of the Roman gods and designed to inspire awe in the mortals who enter. Its 142-foot spherical dome is the largest unreinforced concrete dome in the world. At the peak of the dome, a circular opening 30 feet in diameter provides natural lighting for the interior. As you enter, Kadavy says, "you're enveloped by another world, complete with its own sun." Kadavy explains how Hadrian's objectives combined with significant engineering challenges to produce the widely admired, frequently imitated design. For example, the square recesses in the dome not only create a striking pattern, but also help to reduce the weight of the dome to make it more supportable.

Kadavy tells how, when he was in Rome studying the origins of modern typography, he would go to the Pantheon just to watch people's reactions as they entered. This interest in how designs affect people is one of the reasons his book is so informative. Unfortunately, his interest in the origins of typography leads him to say more on the subject than his theme requires, so you might wish to skim that chapter. My first draft of my book Inside BASIC Games (Sybex, 1981) started with a lot of fascinating but barely relevant material, including an elaborate metaphor for computer programming that involved a player piano. My editor, the great Salley Oberlin, persuaded me to toss out the first 130 pages, and I've never been sorry. I think this book could have benefited from similar advice. Kadavy has excellent points to make about type, but he didn't have to go back to cave painting to lay the groundwork for them. Similarly, he could have gone directly to his points about color without rehashing the philosophy and physics of electromagnetic radiation or repeating information about perception that is handled more thoroughly elsewhere.

The publishers use the back cover to focus attention on Kadavy's discussions of why designers hate the Comic Sans font and why the Golden Ratio is no more useful in laying out designs than simpler ratios like 3:4. These are interesting topics, but marginal. The main topic of the book is visual design, and Kadavy's main point is that design occurs at all levels of a product. An elegant veneer added after the fact is not necessarily good design. It may just be lipstick on a pig. The pattern of square recesses in the dome of the Pantheon is good design, because it arises from the engineering needs and the objectives of the building. The Apple Aqua interface is good design because it exploits previously unavailable technology and responds to cultural forces and user expectations in ways that Kadavy explains.

Kadavy uses the metaphor of learning to dance. You need to learn the basic moves before you can tie them together. Kadavy tries to teach the individual moves (for example, using white space or exploiting type characteristics) by providing examples that vary one design move while holding others constant. This can make for tedious reading, but if you persist, you can learn the moves  -- and then start to dance.

One topic that lives up to the promise of the book's title is Kadavy's discussion of search engine optimization (SEO). He ties it to visual design by saying that design has always been about conveying information to the right audience. I would have accepted that premise and gone on, but he backs it up by digressing on what Aldus Manutius was doing in 1501 and what Jan Tschichold wrote in 1928.

Despite Kadavy's maddening propensity for cluttering his narrative with digressions -- something I'm sure he would never do in a visual design -- this is an interesting and informative book. I recommend it.

Design Recipes

101 Design Ingredients to Solve Big Tech Problems by Eewei Chen (Pragmatic Bookshelf, Dallas TX, 2013, 290pp, ISBN 978-1-93778-532-1, www.pragprog.com, $36.00)

 

The book jacket describes Eewei Chen as a digital tech strategist, former team leader at Microsoft, creative director at Conchango and at ThoughtWorks Europe, and more. Elsewhere (http://haayaa.com) he describes himself as a technology futurist, agilest, and lean design philosopher who has worked in the new media creative industry since 1993. He is apparently a very busy person, which, along with his lean design philosophy, may explain why he wrote such a concise handbook. He provides 101 ingredients, each on a two page spread that follows a precise format. He follows these with ten recipes. Their format is also constrained. Each is four or five pages.

One of the key reasons this book communicates effectively is its illustrator, Robert André. For each design ingredient and recipe, he provides a one-page illustration that conveys the basic idea, enabling Chen to describe it in a few words, accompanied by links to other material. Of the 266 pages in the main body of the book, 111 are devoted to André's illustrations.

Each ingredient has a captioned illustration on the left page and four elements on the right page: a quote, a sentence labeled The Problem, a section labeled The Solution, and a section of footnotes consisting almost entirely of hyperlinks. The solution section consists of a short paragraph followed by three bullets. Each bullet contains a pithy title followed by a brief explanation. Most have a footnote.

Each recipe has an illustration, then lists six ingredients taken from the list of 101. Each ingredient is accompanied by an icon derived from its illustration. The six recipe steps correspond exactly to the six ingredients. Each recipe ends with a section titled Tips on How to Apply This Recipe. Each ingredient is a principle (for example, Lead by Example), not necessarily tied to a specific company. Each recipe is associated with a company. For example, the recipe for effective leadership focuses on Jeff Bezos's leadership of Amazon. One of that recipe's ingredients is Lead by Example. The recipe for world domination consists of Chen's idea of the six ingredients of Google's success, though he seems to be undecided about the sixth ingredient.

Many people have noted that a rigid format (for example, a sonnet, a limerick, or a haiku) leaves plenty of room for creativity. However, the structure Chen has chosen makes it hard to tie things together. For example, ingredient 60 is Check the Data. On the left page is an illustration of a teacup with a teabag steeping in it. The caption says 

"People may be taking a break, not stumbling across a barrier." 

The right page begins with a quote from Albert Einstein: 

"Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted." 

The problem is stated as

 "Companies don't monitor customer usage closely enough to see what's really going on." 

The solution is stated as 

"Analyze and interpret data as part of the design and build process. Shed light on uncertainties, especially if you aren't sure why they really exist." 

The three bullets that elaborate on this solution are as follows:

• Have assumptions to test. There is no point to looking at data if you do not know what you are looking for to start with. List your biggest assumptions and measure success by seeing if they have led to improvements to key performance indicators or success metrics. The footnote leads to a page on the Advanced Performance Institute website that defines and discusses key performance indicators.

• Monitor changes over time. Don't just take one random look. Continue to monitor performance each time you make an improvement, and track changes with groups of users. This is known as batch and cohort analysis. The footnote leads to a blog post by Ash Maurya about using actionable metrics in a lean startup.

• Don't make things up. There is no such thing as random data--there is only data you have not interpreted yet. Get to the bottom of any unusual behavior, and don't go for the obvious, unfounded answer just because it's easier to accept. You'd be succumbing to the false-consensus effect. The footnote leads to a blog post entitled "Why We All Stink as Intuitive Psychologists: The False Consensus Effect."

Chen uses this ingredient in "A Recipe for Lean Startup in Large Organizations," in which he describes techniques used by his collective, HaaYaa. He says in the recipe instruction associated with the Check the Data ingredient:

Identify data across key experiences that indicate success and failure. Analyze the data; gain enough insight and validated learning to make improvements. To keep track of the results of these improvements, I set up customer-experience teams to work with data-analytics teams on monitoring usage stats to see each improvement's effect on groups of cohorts. I also recommend running multivariate tests on variations of a design concept to see which one is most successful.

 Chen obviously knows a lot. This book organizes a great deal of information into a concise presentation. If you like material explained in a leisurely way, this is not the best book for you. But this is a great example of a minimalist style. It might take a while to dig out everything Chen hints at, and along the way you may take some interesting side trips.

Unconscious Meaning

This article appears in slightly different form in the May/Jun 2013 issue of IEEE Micro © 2013 IEEE.

This time I look at a short work that contains a large number of surprising ideas.

A User's Guide to Thought and Meaning by Ray Jackendoff (Oxford, New York, 2012, 274pp ISBN 978-0-19-969320-7, www.oup.com, $29.95)

According to Steven Pinker's blurb on the dust jacket, 

"Ray Jackendoff is a monumental scholar in linguistics who, more than any other scholar alive today, has shown how language can serve as a window into human nature. Combining theoretical depth with a love of revealing detail, Jackendoff illuminates human reason and consciousness in startling and insightful ways." 

Jackendoff is the author of many books on linguistics and cognition, but in this one he presents an overview of some key concepts to a broad audience. He says that as a traditional scholarly treatise it would be a thousand pages long -- if he ever finished it. The usual downside of presenting lots of ideas in a short space is that a book can become, like McLuhan's Understanding Media, too dense for ordinary humans to grasp. But down-to-earth examples, simple diagrams, and a few cartoons -- which provide the revealing detail Pinker refers to -- make this book a pleasure to read.

Cognitive Perspective

The heart of Jackendoff's argument is that thought and meaning are almost completely unconscious; we are aware of pronunciations, sentences, visual surfaces, and a small set of inklings that arise from unconscious processes. The inklings, called character tags, give us the feeling, for example, that a certain sound or visual surface is meaningful, significant, good, taboo, based on sensory input, and so forth. If you say "thit," I'm aware that you said something meaningless, but the mental processes that produce that awareness are as unavailable as those that tell me when to breathe. It's hard to explain what happens in your head when I say, "Osculating means doing this."

Jackendoff presents dozens of small examples that refute many widely held ideas and lead him to conclude that meaning is unconscious. Reading them is enlightening and delightful. They often contrast the ordinary perspective -- the one we're all born with -- which is natural, but can lead to paradoxes (there's no such thing as sunsets), with the cognitive perspective, which always asks, "How does the brain do that?" For example, "John slept until the bell rang" entails a single sleep, while "John jumped until the bell rang" entails potentially many jumps. Nothing in the actual sentences conveys that difference. We can use words after the fact to explain the difference, but it is immediately apparent without that step. Whether the jumping is a one-time event or a repeated activity is an aspect of the unconscious meanings that the sentences don't express.

This book is about software in the sense that Jackendoff is concerned with how the brain provides the experiences of language, thought, and meaning that we are all familiar with. From the ordinary perspective we have no trouble understanding that "the bear chased the lion" and "the lion was chased by the bear" mean the same thing. From the cognitive perspective, we know that this understanding arises from brain activity.  But just as we don't look at digital signals to figure out how a computer executes an algorithm written in Java, Jackendoff doesn't try to explain this phenomenon by looking at neural and chemical activity. He focuses on data structures, information flow, and the states of character tags.

Many people have tried to explain consciousness (for example, see Micro Review, Mar/Apr 1992, where I review Daniel Dennett's Consciousness Explained). Jackendoff reviews some of the more popular theories and challenges them to explain the observed phenomena. He believes that whatever consciousness is, it enables us to perform certain language-based kinds of reasoning, but it gives us limited access to the most important and powerful brain activities that support the way we attach meaning to events in the world. Sentences like "the bear chased the lion" and "the lion was chased by the bear" are different handles for closely linked entries in unconscious data structures. Those structures contain information about lions, bears, chasing, and English grammar. They provide the means by which we can recognize "the wargon chased the olifump" as likely to be an instance of the same sort of activity, even though we don't recognize the words "wargon" or "olifump." The structures also define the conceptual relationships that show types and characteristics: bears are animals, mammals, predators, intelligent creatures, four-legged, and so forth. They exhibit mother/child relationships similar to but different from those of lions or humans. If we see a bear, we know it's a bear even if we have never seen that particular bear before.

Jackendoff, unlike his mentor Noam Chomsky, thinks communication is why language developed, with rational thinking as a side benefit. Rational thinking is important, but it isn't what most of us think it is. As Lewis Carroll pointed out in What the Tortoise Said to Achilles, every syllogism relies on a hidden syllogism in an infinite regress. When we say, "All humans are mortal; Socrates is human; therefore, Socrates is mortal," we have a hidden syllogism that lets us reason that this is of the form "All A are B; C is an A; therefore C is B," and that if we can line up humans, mortal, and Socrates with A, B, and C, then the statement about Socrates is true.  Ultimately, we rely on an unconsciously generated character tag to tell us whether the reasoning is correct.

In Thinking Fast and Slow (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), Daniel Kahneman popularizes System 1, the fast, intuitive mode of thought and System 2, the slow, rational mode of thought. Jackendoff says these correspond to his ideas of unconscious and conscious thought and that they are not separate. System 2 rides on top of System 1 and uses its capabilities. If I encounter a bear with its cubs in the woods, System 1 tells me to head immediately in another direction, while System 2 helps me reason about what the bear might do. System 2 is thought that is linked to a cognitive correlate of consciousness, namely, a data structure that corresponds to our subjective experience of hearing language in our heads and provides a handle for the unconscious thought.

Images, smell, taste, touch, and even the sense of where we are in the world (proprioception)  provide additional handles to unconscious meanings and structures. Blind children, led along two walls of a room to an opposite corner, have no trouble returning along the diagonal to their starting point. This shows that we have unconscious spatial maps that are distinct from visual images.

Jackendoff speculates on the structures that support unconscious thinking. In addition to meanings linked into conceptual structures and spatial maps, every entity that we deal with in the long or short term has a reference file, which holds everything we know about it. The reference file for the mama bear lets us keep her in mind while we ponder other facts that may be helpful. Rational (conscious) thinking enables us to create reference files for thoughts, so we can manipulate and explore them without losing track of them.

Character tags -- of which Jackendoff postulates fewer than a dozen -- play an important role in his model. They explain how we perceive the world as "out there" and how we distinguish actual perception from mental images or dreams. He postulates a character tag that gives us a sense of whether the visual surface in our head arises from our minds or from sensory input. This character tag is often ineffective during dreaming, and it sometimes gives schizophrenics the wrong message. Another character tag provides a sense of whether we are in control of ongoing events. This forms the basis of our sense of free will.

Implications

Jackendoff's model of unconscious structures and character tags does more than simply explain the relationships between language, thought, and meaning. It provides a coherent explanation of how we understand and experience the world. For example, from the ordinary perspective, we ask, "What is truth?" Jackendoff answers by showing that question to be hard to answer. He shows pictures of men of varying degrees of baldness, looks at the one in the middle and asks, "Is Ed bald?" He prefers the cognitive perspective, which asks, "What does the brain do when it judges a statement to be true?"  This leads to the conclusion that judging truth largely happens unconsciously, and that the well known phenomena of confirmation bias and denial play a part.

The fact that meaning is unconscious and that System 1 thinking is fast and pretty accurate does not mean that rational thinking is useless. In fact, rational thinking is a large part of what distinguishes humans from other animals. Language, which characterizes System 2 thinking, enables us to give thoughts reference files of their own, describe and manipulate the information provided by character tags, and engage in hypothetical reasoning. We can transform the results of intuitive reasoning into explicit steps and challenge each one.  The famous example is the bat and ball that cost a total of $1.10, with the bat costing a dollar more than the ball. Intuitive reasoning immediately says that the ball costs ten cents, but rational thinking, plodding along methodically, arrives at the correct answer.

All of this has implications for teaching, learning, or becoming a virtuoso of art or science. Jackendoff, an accomplished concert clarinetist, illustrates this by telling how his chamber group spent 15 minutes deciding how to play the first six seconds of the Brahms Clarinet Quintet. From this he extrapolates to how to integrate rational and intuitive thinking in music, theater, sports, art, writing, and every other skilled activity -- even reasoning itself. The goal is always "flow" -- that state in which it all goes so well we surprise ourselves.

Jackendoff tries to show that the arts matter as much as science. I believe that he is correct but it's a hard argument to make. Rational thinking, because it is based on language, conceals aspects of thought that language cannot express. Science resonates with the rational while the arts resonate with the intuitive. Science looks for ever broader generalizations that minimize the surface of appearances. Artistic appreciation seeks intricate and subtle details and patterns. It reveals the character of the surface -- not what is said, but how. Because System 2 rides on System 1, you can't have rationality without the underlying intuition, and the better you train the intuition, the better the rationality will be. As I said, it's a hard argument to make.

The book is a deceptively easy read. I got through it once and realized that I had missed many key points. I had to start over and take careful notes. The book is densely packed with insights and ideas, which are well worth the effort of grasping them.

Ethics of Big Data

This article appears in slightly different form in the Mar/Apr 2013 issue of IEEE Micro © 2013 IEEE.

This time I look at a book that anyone who has ever done anything online should read.

Ethics of Big Data by Kord Davis with Doug Patterson (O'Reilly, Sebastopol CA, 2012, 82pp, ISBN 978-1-4493-1179-7, $19.99, www.oreilly.com )

Kord Davis played with technology from an early age, and he loved learning its underlying principles and mechanisms. He chose to study philosophy because it gave him the best of both worlds: rigorous analysis and uncovering the way things work. Now, with a degree in philosophy from Reed College, he advises high-tech companies about how to align their business practices with their values and principles. Doug Patterson teaches business ethics. His discussions with Davis led to many of the ideas in this book.

For many years society has struggled with the implications of gathering and analyzing personal data. The vastly increased speed and quantity of such activities have created a qualitatively new situation, generally known as big data. Some of the hardest questions businesses face today arise out of big data. For example, with enough information about your environment, someone can know a lot about you without knowing your name or Social Security number. And by combining such troves of information from disparate sources, an organization can build an intrusive dossier about you without actually violating the well-intentioned privacy policies of the organizations that originally collected the data.

Davis defines the forcing function of big data as the push, whether we like it or not, 

"to consider serious ethical issues including whether certain uses of big data violate fundamental civil, social, political, and legal rights." 

Companies were once thrilled at the prospect of knowing which color car is purchased most often in Texas in the summertime. Now they can know how much toothpaste your family bought from them last year.  Does it matter if Target knows you are pregnant before your husband does?  What if your boss does?  Considering such issues falls outside the usual business discussions, even at the strategic level. Davis presents a framework for such consideration. Because each business situation is different, he includes both abstract and specific elements.

Davis begins with the basic concepts:  identity, privacy, ownership, and reputation. These concepts are central to many ethical discussions, so he wants to establish their definitions and scopes. Identity concerns the relationship between our online and offline lives. Privacy issues boil down to who should control access to data. Ownership concerns not just who owns collected data but which rights can be transferred and what obligations collecting or receiving such data entails. Reputation is about what you can trust. Big data provides both sources of error and checks and balances. 

In addition to these abstract elements, each business has its own values and principles. Big data is ethically neutral, that is, the ethical questions arise from aligning organizational and societal values with organizational actions. Davis presents a system for carrying out this alignment. He believes that by gaining competence in this area, organizations can help to shape public opinion, not just react to it.

Many people are concerned with their right to privacy. Davis feels that using the term "privacy right," because of its connotation of absoluteness, can prejudge some of the ethical issues that arise as organizations try to align their policies with their values. He prefers the term "privacy interest," which covers the gamut from no interest to absolute rights. That is, a right is the strongest kind of interest.

Similarly, Davis avoids the term "personally identifying information," because the technological limitations that define that term are constantly changing. What was once not considered personally identifying can, with new technology, be easily associated with a person. Davis uses the term "personal data" to refer to any data generated in the course of a person's activities. Digital transactions in business or social areas capture related information distinct from the data of the transaction, and by this definition, all of it is personal data.

Davis contrasts the digital and non-digital situations. If you show someone a picture at a party, the event leaves little residue. Post the same picture on your Facebook page, and the permanent record includes plenty of ancillary personal information. Deciding which personal information is ancillary and which is not has an ethical impact. Davis advocates explicitly and transparently evaluating that impact. Doing so starts with articulating organizational values. Values can change over time, and trying to align values with actions can lead to reconsidering those values. Thus, Davis defines an ethical decision point as a  cycle, iterated indefinitely, consisting of the following activities: inquiry, analysis, articulation, and action.

Inquiry means discovering and discussing the organization's core values. Sometimes organizations have one set of values in their founding documents or public relations literature but show by their actions that they have a different set of unstated values. Inquiry aims at discovering the organization's actual values. An example of a value is "We value transparency in our use of big data."

Analysis means reviewing the organization's actual or proposed data-handling practices and determining how well they align with the identified values. For example, analysis might ask whether deducing that a woman is pregnant and placing ads for nursery furniture in front of her aligns well with a stated value of telling customers how the organization uses their personal information.

Articulation means writing the results of analysis, that is, stating explicitly where values and actions align and where they don't.

Action means producing and executing plans to close alignment gaps and to prevent new ones from developing. For example, you might decide to place a button labeled "Why am I seeing this ad?" next to the ad for nursery furniture.

Deciding which organizational activities require this ethical decision point process is tricky. One method, which Davis recognizes as not entirely satisfactory, is to look for the "creepy" factor. Like the Supreme Court's definition of pornography, this determination involves the phrase "I know it when I see it."  For example, it strikes many people as creepy when a retail firm determines whether a woman is pregnant based on her online behavior, so the organization should use the ethical decision point process to evaluate any actions it takes in this area. A health maintenance organization engaging in similar behavior might seem less creepy, so the ethical decision point process might be less important in that case.

Davis talks about ethical decision points in the context of big data, but the methodology is applicable to all sorts of situations. We all have values, and we all do something like ethical decision point analysis in our everyday lives. The speed and scale of big data technology make it essential for organizations develop the ability to carry out the process explicitly and transparently as a core competency. This reduces the risks of unintended consequences and provides a starting point for a clear and immediate response when things go wrong.

To determine the current practices of large organizations, Davis visited the websites of the top 50 of the Fortune 500 companies in the Fall of 2011. Few of these organizations understand and articulate sets of values that customers can use to interpret the organizations' imprecise policy statements. Most focus on "privacy" with little mention of identity, ownership, and reputation. Most are concerned with "personally identifying information" but fail to define that term. Most say that they don't sell personal data, but none claim that they don't buy such data. There is much more information in Davis's summary of his findings. Things may have changed for the better since this survey, but what he found was not encouraging.

Davis sees hope in the fact that the organizations he studied have many strong capabilities in place: leadership and management, strategic planning, a product development process, communication, education and training, and a process for initiating change. But he also notes that not everyone in an organization has the same values and that different roles within an organization have conflicting interests in transparency and alignment. And in the face of tactical pressures, it's tempting to kick the can down the road by avoiding ethical discussions entirely. Davis hopes to overcome these difficulties by taking a cookbook approach. The final third of this short book lays out his alignment methodology framework in more detail, complete with forms and a case study. The forms help you define value personas, an analog of customer personas, which most executives and marketing personnel understand.

This focuses on a critical area for every company that deals with big data and every person who engages in online transactions. As Davis points out, if you ask people what they want, they will tell you. By insisting on definitions of terms and explicit statements of values and how actions align with those values, he creates a framework in which people can discuss difficult issues without unnecessary confusion or rancor. I highly recommend this book to everyone.

Prominently Introduced

This article appears in slightly different form in the Sep/Oct 2012 issue of IEEE Micro © 2012 IEEE.

Each of the books in this column has a foreword written by someone substantially better known than its author.

Presenting Numbers

Painting With Numbers: Presenting Financials and Other Numbers So People Will Understand You by Randall Bolten (Wiley, Hoboken NJ, 2012, 342pp, ISBN 978-1-118-17257-5, www.wiley.com, $39.95)

Randall Bolten spent many years as a financial executive in Silicon Valley, and he certainly knows how to get into the nuts and bolts of financial analysis. But what distinguishes him, and this book, is his passion for communication. If you go to the Wiley website, you find the book listed under Business Statistics and Math, surrounded by titles like Data Driven Business Decisions and SPSS Version 18.0 for Windows. Even his publisher fails to understand the first sentence of chapter 1: "This book is not about numbers." It's about communication.

Tom Campbell represented Silicon Valley in the US Congress for five terms. He has a PhD in economics from the University of Chicago. He is a law professor, dean of a law school, and former dean of a business school. When he ran for statewide office in California in 2009, he retained Bolten to prepare his economic and fiscal policy handouts. In his foreword, he says,

 "I feel strongly that clearly and honestly presented data is essential to an informed electorate, and Randall made it possible for me to put that belief into practice." 

As if that weren't enough to establish Bolten's credentials, the back of the book has blurbs from a former Director of the Office of Management and Budget (Randall's brother Joshua) and the CEO of the New York Stock Exchange.

Bolten has mastered the main tool of his trade, Microsoft Excel, but the book is not about Excel. He includes a number of Excel tips and tricks, all of them excellent, but he focuses on communication. His tips on formatting and presentation are independent of subject, but he does talk about the content of some common financial reports. The furthest he goes into the weeds of financial minutiae is to critique generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) which, ironically, are based on concrete rules, not general principles. He also devotes a chapter to understanding and designing profit and loss statements, but anyone who has much to do with running or investing in businesses has run into more than one P&L. 

Key to Bolten's approach is to know and respect your audience. For example, your first step in putting together a numerical report is to lay out the final summary page, then get feedback from the audience to find out whether your idea of what they need matches theirs. Then work backward to design supporting reports, and finally figure out where and how to get the numbers. Starting this process from the other end can easily lead you to reports that miss the mark and are hard to repair.

Bolten lays out a three-stage path to mastery. First, you must understand the rules and best practices. Bolten gives you a tour of these, with special emphasis on 18 deadly sins. The second and third stages are complementary: understand your audience and become a subject matter expert. Bolten doesn't say how to accomplish the second and third stages, but his deadly sins often reflect failures in those areas.

Bolten's first 10 sins are about presentation. They deal with columns of numbers that don't line up, vast seas of white space caused by a long column label, reports that fit on a single page only because the font is illegibly small, and so forth. But they also deal with more substantive matters, like presenting numbers without context or using imprecise or inaccurate column labels. And some are general advice that everybody has heard before: don't use visual effects without a good reason, and never use pie charts.

The next 8 sins are about your behavior. Their underlying theme is your attitude toward your audience and your craft. The deadliest of these is the one he compares to the sin of pride: "I'm more focused on content than presentation." Every profession has its own version of this self-righteous utterance.

Economists talk about key indicators. Bolten points out that these are always ratios. He sees a deep principle here. A raw number means nothing out of context, and comparing it to another number provides that context. The fact that your favorite baseball player has 47 hits so far this season is interesting, but if you divide that by his 117 at-bats, you see that he is hitting .402, which you can compare with other players' batting averages. Whenever you present numbers, look for the key indicators that will resonate with your audience. Also (the negative of this is one of Bolten's deadly sins), include somewhere on the page the two numbers whose ratio yields the key indicator.

Bolten's primary audience is other financial professionals, but none of the material is arcane or esoteric. I am far from being a financial professional, but I find the book useful and fascinating.  The chapter on terminology is a treasure. It ought to be required reading in all high schools. I hear financial terms all the time, but until I read this chapter I had no idea of the many subtle distinctions between similar sounding terms.

I have heard Bolten speak about the material in this book. In person or on the page, he is a skilled communicator. Regardless of your background, you can sit down with this book and read it in a day or so. I learned a great deal from it, and I think you will too.

Finding a Job

Cracking the New Job Market: Seven Rules for Getting Hired in Any Economy by R. William Holland (AMACOM, New York NY, 2012, 256pp, ISBN 978-0-8144-1734-8, www.amacombooks.org, $17.95)

I have reviewed many books about job hunting and résumés, and after a while they all look alike. The first thing that intrigued me about this one is that it has a foreword by Barbara Ehrenreich. Ehrenreich is author of Bait and Switch (Metropolitan Books, 2005), a book about unemployed white-collar workers. Ehrenreich feels that these workers are underserved and exploited. Her concerns led her to found United Professionals (UP), and Bill Holland became its president. Holland is a career-management consultant and a former human resources manager. According to Ehrenreich, he 

"has a sophisticated understanding of what is happening in the job market and what to do about it on a personal level."

The old job-hunting rules were to assemble your career highlights into a résumé, study interviewing techniques, prepare for tricky questions, and do a lot of face-to-face networking. Holland sees a fundamental change in the market and puts together new rules. He gives the usual advice about demonstrating your value to potential employers, and he lays out practical techniques for doing so. But each job is different, and you must attack each one on its own terms.

Holland says to start by identifying the key items that the hiring manager is looking for and organize your job application and interviews around those items. The key items point to what the company is looking for, that is, the value they are willing to pay you to create. Holland lays out a procedure for highlighting aspects of your experience that show how you have created similar value in other jobs. You use that information to tailor your résumé and cover letter and to help prepare for an interview.

Holland assumes that you can mine job ads for the key items that signal what the employer is looking for. As we all know, the people who write ads for high-tech jobs often have little idea what hiring managers are really looking for, so finding the key items may require you to do some digging behind the scenes. Social media can help here.

Holland believes in using social media. He notes the standard advice about the "hidden job market" available only through face-to-face networking, but says that the statistics usually cited to support that advice are unverified. In any event, new rules apply to the world of social media, where weak ties are just as effective as strong ones. A LinkedIn chain leading to someone you hardly know can bring you essential information about potential jobs.

One of Holland's seven rules is that interviews are "about the value you demonstrate." In applying for a job you aligned your résumé with the value the employer wants you to create. Prepare for the interview by reviewing that alignment and learning everything you can about the company. You can't memorize an answer for every possible question, but if you relax, you can bring whatever comes your way back to the question of the value you can create.

Holland believes that in the job market, women are different. He devotes a chapter to women who take career breaks. In essence, he advises continuing professional activities, and staying up to date. Network on the Internet. Start a blog. When they ask about your career break, you can say, 

"Career break? What career break?"

Holland has good advice for young people choosing a career and for their parents. College administrators invented the term "helicopter parent" to make parents leave them alone, but colleges have not earned a free rein. They don't typically help students prepare effectively for careers. Any major can lead to a job, but not all majors lead to a marketable education. Good jobs need critical thinking, complex reasoning, and skill at written communication. Parents should not wait four years to see how college works out but should help their children assess their own progress at least annually.

Holland sprinkles many facts and statistics throughout the pages of this book. They give an overall picture of the current job market. Absorbing that picture can provide context for informed career decisions. Those decisions can make job hunting unnecessary or at least easier if the need arises.

If you're looking for a job -- your first or your umpteenth -- you need all the help you can get, and Holland's book is filled with excellent, up-to-date advice. If I were looking for a job, I'd spend the first day studying this book.

Miscellany

This article appears in slightly different form in the Mar/Apr 2012 issue of IEEE Micro © 2012 IEEE.

This time I look at a variety of books. I read several of them carefully with an eye toward writing full-blown reviews, but then decided that what I have to say about them doesn't warrant a complete column. 

Infinity

Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity by David Foster Wallace (Atlas/Norton, New York, 2010, 376pp, ISBN 978-0-393-33928-4, www.wwnorton.com, 15.95)

David Foster Wallace was the author of Infinite Jest (Little, Brown, 1996) and other novels. Many regard him as one of the great thinkers of our time. Twenty years of depression, however, led him to take his own life at the age of 46. This edition of Everything and More, appearing several years after Wallace's death, benefits from a foreword by Neal Stephenson, who, like Wallace, grew up in a midwestern American college town. Stephenson sees Wallace's writing about an abstruse subject in which he was not academically trained as a perfectly normal reflection of that upbringing.

Though his graduate degree was in fine arts, Wallace distinguished himself in his undergaduate studies at Amherst by writing a prize-winning thesis on the arcane subject of modal logic. Thus he was well prepared to examine the philosophical and mathematical precursors of Georg Cantor (1845 - 1918), who establised a consistent mathematical basis for studying the infinite. Cantor died as a result of mental illness, as did Kurt Gödel after him. Wallace considers this evidence of the dangers of abstract thinking. He defines sanity as the ability to cut off a line of abstract thinking that won't end. 

Wallace has stylistic quirks that make him difficult to read. He seems obsessed with saving space. He uses abbreviations frequently. For example, he may mention the Bolzano-Weierstrass Theorem in one paragraph, then without warning refer to it as the BWT a few paragraphs later. He also uses footnotes extensively for digressions. He provides codes designed to help you decide how important these digressions are, but it's safer to ignore the codes and read all of the digressions. He begins the book with a "Small but Necessary Foreword." Unfortunately, none of the chapters have titles, and the transition from the end of the foreword to the beginning of the first chapter is so slight that I read hundreds of pages thinking I was still in an ironically named foreword.

Cantor's work comes at the end of a long journey that begins with Zeno's paradoxes. Wallace follows the philosophical, logical, and mathematical paths that lead from antiquity to Cantor. If you enjoy reading about modern mathematics, you'll enjoy this fascinating story.

Friedman Again

That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World it Created and How We Can Come Back by Thomas L Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, New York, 2011, 396pp, ISBN 978-0-374-28890-7, www.fsgbooks.com, $28.00)

In earlier columns I reviewed two of New York Times columnist Tom Friedman's books: The World Is Flat (May/June 2005) and Hot, Flat, and Crowded (Jan/Feb 2009). This time Friedman teams up with his friend Michael Mandelbaum, a professor of foreign policy. The book returns to many of the themes of Friedman's earlier books. Unlike those earlier books, this one explicitly explores the implications of the authors' findings for American domestic policy.

Both men grew up in 1950s middle America and are alarmed at some of the changes they see. They identify four major challenges facing us, and they prescribe a return to the formula for success that they believe the country followed in the days of their youth. The challenges are as follows: 

• Adapting to globalization.
• Adjusting to rapid advances in information technology.
• Dealing with deficits, debt, and future obligations.
• Dealing with energy consumption and climate change.

The formula, based on the principle of using public funds to share burdens, is as follows:

• Provide public education for all.
• Provide and maintain infrastructure.
• Assimilate substantial waves of immigration.
• Support research and development.
• Regulate private economic activity.

That Used to Be Us shows how to apply the formula to the challenges. The details are political as well as technical. It's an easy read and well worth your time.

Teaching by Manga

Manga are, in essence, comic books done in a specific style. Developed in Japan, they are now popular in America and elsewhere. The following books exploit manga conventions to convey serious messages. 

The Adventures of Johnny Bunko by Daniel H Pink, art by Rob Ten Pas (Riverhead Books/Penguin, New York, 2008, 160pp, ISBN 978-1-59448-291-5, us.penguingroup.com, $15.00)

Trained as a lawyer, Daniel Pink served as a speech writer during the Clinton administration. Now he publishes books and articles on business and technology. In 2007 he won a fellowship to go to Japan to study the manga industry. When he came back, he worked with a manga artist to write a self-help business book, The Adventures of Johnny Bunko. I bought this book on the recommendation of my friend Andrea Ames, a senior technical staff member at IBM. 

Johnny Bunko is new to the workforce. He likes art, but on his dad's advice, he majored in accounting so he would always have a job. Now, as a clueless new accountant at the Boggs Corporation, he is floundering. Eating Japanese takeout at his desk late at night, he discovers that by snapping apart his wooden chopsticks, he can make a magic career consultant appear. To make a long story short, she leads him through a series of work situations, each of which teaches him a new lesson. The lessons are as follows:

• There is no plan -- you can't predict what's going to happen, so you might as well do what you like.
• Think strengths, not weaknesses, that is, you're better off developing your strengths than trying to shore up your weaknesses.
• It's not about you -- focus on your customer.
• Persistence trumps talent -- keep trying and eventually you'll get there.
• Make excellent mistakes -- it's better to try something big and fail than to be too cautious.
• Leave an imprint -- don't wait until your career is over to ask what you'll be remembered for.  

The manga tells a coherent, engaging story that drives these lessons home. It's well worth the hour or so it might take to read it.


The Manga Guide to Statistics by Shin Takahashi (No Starch, San Francisco, 2008, 224pp, ISBN 978-1-59327-189-3, www.oreilly.com, $19.95)

This is one of a series of Manga Guides to technical subjects -- not the newest, but the one judged by my in-house manga expert (my daughter) to be the most successful of the lot because it is both a good manga and a good textbook. Bright, boy-crazy high school girl Rui decides that she wants to learn statistics because her father's handsome young employee, Mr Igarashi, is a statistics whiz. Her father agrees to have her tutored in the subject but to her disappointment substitutes another young employee, Mr Yamamoto, whose most prominent feature is his nerdy eyeglasses.

Yamamoto teaches her all about statistics using believable examples from high-school life. She learns about numerical and categorical data, distributions, probabilities, correlations, and hypothesis testing. If she reads the appendix, she also learns how to use Excel to store and manipulate data. In the end, Mr Igarashi turns out to be married. Yamamoto's eyeglasses break, and Rui sees his face for the first time and falls for him instead.

If you know any manga fans who want to learn basic statistics, get them a copy of this book.

Publishing Effective Books

The next two books deal with the art and craft of turning thoughts into professionally published works. 

Developmental Editing by Scott Norton (Chicago, 2009, 252pp, ISBN 978-0-226-59514-6, www.press.uchicago.edu, $35.00)

Many factors go into making a good manuscript -- the writer's knowledge, perceptiveness, and imagination to name some important ones. But the step from a manuscript to a successful book requires a different talent, one that many writers do not have. That is where developmental editors come in.

Scott Norton is developmental editor and project manager for science at the University of California Press. As Norton points out, the process of developmental editing is not only complex but also difficult to illustrate by simple examples. He creates several extended narrative examples and uses them to illustrate different aspects of the process he follows when working with manuscripts. The narrative examples are sufficiently detailed to illustrate his processes yet much easier to work with than actual manuscripts. 

The intricate way Norton put this book together enables him to convey a lot of material in ten short chapters. Creating the examples was a deceptively difficult task, which he accomplished highly successfully. The book is worth reading simply to admire the craft with which Norton constructed it.

The craft of developmental editing, as Norton presents it in this book, can be learned. If you are doing other kinds of editing and wish to branch out, this book will help. If you are an author who reads this book in order to work more effectively with developmental editors, you may find that Norton's perspective helps you improve your writing. In fact, if you have anything at all to do with writing and publishing, I think you'll enjoy this book. I have done developmental editing, but I still learned a lot from reading it.


The IBM Style Guide: Conventions for Writers and Editors by Francis DeRespinis et al (IBM Press/Pearson, Upper Saddle River NJ, 2012, 416pp, ISBN 978-0-13-210130-1, www.ibmpressbooks.com, $39.99)

Style guides have an important role in any publishing process. Even a single work by a single author can benefit from a brief list of names, product terminology, or style choices, so that they remain consistent throughout the work. Several writers collaborating on an online help system for a large software package need more substantial lists, and corporate style guides arise from such needs. These guides are often amalgams of style rules, publishing procedures,  and guidelines for using software packages or markup languages. Creating a corporate style guide can be a long and acrimonious process that duplicates a lot of work that others have done better.

The style guides of large organizations like the University of Chicago Press or Microsoft often receive wide distribution outside those organizations and establish standards for whole industries. The most successful corporate style guides delegate most style decisions to such standard guides and focus on styles and terminology that are important in their product documentation. The IBM Style Guide follows this model to some extent, delegating many decisions to the Chicago Manual of Style. But it also covers a wide range of material of interest to others in the computer industry. Because it is clear, consistent, and thorough, it seems likely to become an industry standard.

Style guides can turn arbitrary choices into annoyingly rigid rules. The IBM Style Guide presents the reasons behind its choices, and I haven't found any choices that would bother me if I had to follow them. The explanations also make it easier to make good decisions about issues that the guide does not address. The guide is exceptionally well written -- not always the case with style guides -- though I did notice one dangling modifier in a table in an appendix.

I have seen many computer industry style guides. I believe that the Microsoft guide is the most widely used, but The IBM Style Guide has a good chance to supplant it. I do not like the early versions of the Microsoft Manual of Style. I have seen previews of the upcoming fourth edition, and it looks much better. If you are writing about Microsoft products, that is an added reason to use the Microsoft guide, so I'm sure it will remain popular. Nonetheless, The IBM Style Guide is superior to any version of the Microsoft guide that I have seen so far. If you are part of a writing group looking for an industry standard style guide, consider this one.

Effective Communication

This article appears in slightly different form in the Sept/Oct 2011 issue of IEEE Micro © 2011 IEEE.


Trees, Maps, and Theorems: Effective communication for rational minds by Jean-luc Doumont (Principiae, Kraainem Belgium, 2009, 190pp, ISBN 978-90-813677-07, www.treesmapsandtheorems.com/, $96.00) 


If you can read only one book on technical communication, pick this one. In a magnificent illustration of his own methods, the author lays out basic principles, then applies them to the main types of communication that we all struggle with: documents and oral presentations. He also applies the same principles to producing graphic displays, procedures, meeting reports, scientific posters, websites, and email. 


Jean-luc Doumont is a professional speaker -- in English, French, Dutch, and Spanish. He has a degree from the Louvain School of Engineering in Belgium and a PhD in applied physics from Stanford University. He wrote this book in English. 


I first met Doumont when we were fellow speakers on a lunchtime panel at the 2006 IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Society Symposium in San Francisco. We invited engineers to bring their lunches into a large presentation room at the Moscone Center and listen to our advice about making effective presentations. I don't know how much the microwave engineers learned, but I was impressed by Jean-luc's professional approach to the project. In the months before the event, he raised many issues about our presentations and the room's logistics. Now, having read his book, I understand what lay behind those issues. His theories and practices have evolved from his long experience as a speaker.


Principles 


Doumont believes that effective communication entails optimization under constraints. We want our audiences to get as much as possible from our communications, but we can't control everything. This leads to his three laws of communication: 

• Adapt to your audience, because you can't usually control its composition. 
• Maximize the signal-to-noise ratio, so others can receive your message with a minimum of loss. 
• Use effective redundancy, to compensate for losses you can't control. 

Adapting to your audience is the most important of these rules and the hardest to follow. The audience members are constrained by language differences, their background knowledge, and even the amount of time they have to spend. You must anticipate their needs and expectations, and you must structure your arguments along their lines of reasoning. If they fail to understand, then you fail. If your first efforts don't succeed, you must try, try again. 


Maximizing the signal-to-noise ratio is tricky because it goes against some of our instincts. Everything matters. What does not help detracts; words, gestures, typos, flashy graphics, the keys in a speaker's pocket -- all qualify as noise. Question the relevance of anything you plan to present. Emphasize by suppressing, not by adding. 


Effective redundancy arises from simultaneously providing the same message in different media. Doumont's exemplar of effective redundancy is the stop sign. The octagonal shape, the red color, the position in the driver's field of view, and the word STOP all combine to reinforce a single message. Many speakers, however, make the mistake of providing different messages simultaneously. I have seen highly intelligent people project paragraphs of dense text onto a screen and say, "You can read that for yourself," then begin immediately to discuss the topic in different words. Doumont makes the point that if you simultaneously speak and project words on a screen, the text in the two media should be the same. 


Doumont explores the role of visual elements in communication. To do so he generalizes the distinction between pictures and words; he creates a taxonomy of communication types. The taxonomy has three axes: verbal/non-verbal, rational/intuitive, and sequential/global (that is, serial/parallel). A string of text on a screen is verbal, rational, and sequential. An audience, seeing that text and hearing you repeat it, can simultaneously process a picture on the screen. They might receive a different, even contradictory, message from the picture. This is bad for communication, though it might be effective as irony, or for sublimnal persuasion. We have highly developed filters for evaluating text, so it is hard for someone to mislead us with words. We have far fewer filters for images, which we process intuitively. 


Unfiltered intuitive processing can mean that a picture of what not to do can fail to have the desired effect. A graph with a widely spread out axis can make a small difference look deceptively large. This extends to other non-verbal cues. Your clothing, stance, voice, and movements as a speaker can affect your credibility. Doumont's bottom line is that every non-verbal message that does not reinforce your verbal message is noise. You should eliminate it. 


In 1956 the cognitive psychologist George Miller published a paper that led to the notion that our short term memories can accommodate between five and nine items. This has given rise to the widely promulgated rule of thumb that says that lists, procedures, and so forth should be limited to six items. Doumont uses a different numerical analysis to arrive at a smaller number. He also notes that humans can process balanced hierarchies more easily than linear lists. He gives guidelines for the width and depth of such hierarchies. I enjoyed reading Doumont's numerical theories, but I trust his conclusions, which are based on experience, more than his explanations for why they are true. 


The book's title describes Doumont's basic approach to structuring information. Trees are another name for the balanced hierarchies discussed earlier. Reasoning that we handle recursion with even more difficulty than lists, Doumont prefers breadth of structure to depth. His ideal document might have five chapters, each with five sections, and each of those with five subsections. He recommends various combining strategies to limit depth and breadth. 


The term maps refers to the forms of navigation you provide to your audience. Doumont believes that readers can navigate an effective structure effortlessly if you make it visible to them. For example, in a book structured as in the previous paragraph, you might provide a global map, and at each level tell readers what the divisions at that level contain. A running header or footer helps readers know where they are, and cross-references tell them where they can go. Oral presentations and websites need similar navigational aids, but each of these has its own problems. Without help, you can easily get lost on a website. During an oral presentation, you're stuck on a single track, but if your mind wanders, you need help to find your way back quickly. 


The reference to theorems is a shorthand way to say that the busy professionals who might read your book or listen to your presentation want to know in advance what you intend to prove. Then they can decide whether they're interested in hearing the proof. This models the way mathematicians present theorems. It is, of course, not the way they discover them. Many presenters want to lead readers along the path they followed to reach their conclusions. They want to save the punch line for the end. For almost all papers or presentations, that is the wrong approach. It will frustrate your audience and potentially waste their time. They wish to be informed, not taught. 


Documents 


Having laid out a set of principles, Doumont applies them to developing many forms of communication. The main ones, of course, are written documents and oral presentations. For each of these he defines a process for applying his principles systematically to create a communication in that medium. For written documents, his process is deceptively simple: plan, design, draft, format, revise. 


Planning starts with asking why, who, what, when, and where. The last two are about logistics, and you can go badly wrong if you ignore them. The first three are a shorthand for determining the purpose of the document, the audience, and the necessary content. The purpose is what the audience should do (or be able to do) after reading the document. Doumont defines a two dimensional breakdown of the audience: specialist/non-specialist and primary/secondary. The primary audience consists of those in the To field of the email, those attending a talk, or those reading a research report when it first comes out. Members of the secondary audience are in the Cc field, hear a recording of the talk, or look up something in the report months later. Each quadrant has needs, and in some cases they conflict. The trick is to provide something for everyone without annoying anyone. 


Designing the document addresses content and its order of presentation. Using the theorem model, Doumont shows how to give readers the information in a useful and effective manner. For documents of varying sizes, he shows how to reformat the author's chronology into a nested structure of situation, problem/solution, and work done. He then shows how to present this structure using the traditional components: abstract, foreword, summary, introduction, body, and conclusion. He uses the idea of fractals to convey the idea of a document whose structure at each level reproduces its global structure. This can be carried to extremes, but Doumont remains practical. 


Doumont provides detailed advice about drafting and revising, but it is hard to summarize, so you'll have to read it for yourself. A main principle underlying these phases is to strive for clarity, accuracy, and conciseness. Don't simplify the ideas, but convey complexity simply. 


Formatting is about structure, not aesthetics. Doumont's main example of formatting is his own book. Each two-page spread has four columns of equal width. Doumont tells readers:

The book was designed to propose a logical flow for the discussion while enabling selective reading of individual parts, chapters, or sections. Feel free therefore to read the complete discussion linearly or to jump ahead to the themes of interest to you. Topics are discussed in one double page each time (or in a small integer number of them), to facilitate their direct access or out-of-sequence processing.

The pages, too, are formatted for selective reading. The right page is reserved for the main discussion, with illustrations, limited examples, or comments placed left of the text. In relation to this discussion, the left page answers frequently asked questions collected at the occasion of lectures and workshops, set on a gray background. In the remaining space it lists typical shortcomings, offers practical advice on specific subtopics, or broadens the discussion.

The resulting book has a clean, regular design with a large amount of white space. You rarely have to turn the page while reading about a topic. 


Presentations 


Doumont's specialty is public speaking. Like his book, his public appearances provide excellent examples of his methods. If you have a chance to attend one of his talks, don't miss it. This book explains many of his methods, but seeing the methods in action is doubly powerful. 


Doumont boils oral presentations down to this:

[Engage] the audience with mind and body, conveying well-structured messages with sincerity, confidence, and, yes, passion. 

As with documents, he has a procedure for achieving this end. The steps are plan, design, create slides, rehearse, present, answer questions. The planning phase is similar to that for a written document, but the design phase must confront the specific challenges of oral presentations. 


Oral presentations are synchronous. The speaker defines the sequence and rhythm, and the audience can't skip around. They need visual cues and clear transitions. A strong opening grabs their attention and helps them see what's coming. A strong closing tells them that they can relax and clap, but also leaves them clearly aware of what you want them to do next. 


Audiences cannot follow detailed evidence, so you should concentrate on a convincing delivery and leave the details to handouts or references. A convincing delivery relies on a good rapport between speaker and audience. Don't try to say too much. Stick to one main message. Decide on that message early in your planning phase, and state the message early in the talk. 


Creating slides is a place where many presenters fall down. The slides provide visual cues to where you are, and they convey the same message that your spoken text conveys. In fact, Doumont says the spoken text and the slides should each stand alone. A person who cannot see should be able to follow the spoken presentation, and a person who has difficulty hearing or understanding your spoken words should be able to understand the presentation from the slides. Slides are potentially helpful extras, but bad slides can substantially detract from a presentation. 


Speakers who create bad slides often do so because they are creating the slides for themselves, not for the audience. Dense, cryptic text can help speakers remember what to say, but it detracts from the talk as readers struggle to understand the slides. Some speakers think their slides should double as a written report. What they produce serves neither purpose. Other speakers, in a hurry, copy paragraphs from written documents onto slides. Such slides are worse than none at all. 


Delivering a presentation is a performance in real time. You can practice parts of it in advance -- what to say, how to say it, how to stand or move, and when to change slides. It is important not to have to struggle with those aspects of the presentation, so you can focus on receiving and reacting to the cues your audience sends you. At the same time, you should reduce the noise caused by clothing, jewelry, name tags, or excessive movement. 


Doumont has much more to say, and it's all worth studying, but you'll have to read the book. I hope you do.